Testing - Storage and USB

SATA

For the storage tests, we ran a bare Kingston HyperX 3k 240GB SSD through three separate benchmarks, AS SSD, ATTO, and CrystalDiskMark. The Maximus V Formula is about neck-and-neck with the other Z77 motherboards we have tested in read and write speeds, which comes as no surprise. Performance across all three boards was found to be nearly identical in a 1024K ATTO thread transfer test, with the native Intel 6GB/s ports pulling out a predicatable lead. Overall, the performance between the three boards is close, but it's nice to see a bit of added value with the ASUS ASMedia controller, which yields performance almost exactly between the 3 GB/s and 6 GB/s transfer speeds. This is especially valuable to those who have more than two SSDs, a crowd which remains somewhat of a minority. However, SSD prices have been rapidly falling towards the $1 per gigabyte sweet spot with a little bit of help from the Ultra Plus high-capacity drives that were announced at CES 2013.

USB

For the USB tests, CrystalDiskMark was used to measure the transfer speeds to the Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SSD using a direct SATA to USB 3.0 boost cable. USB 2.0 performance is a draw between the three boards, while non-boosted USB 3.0 performance falls to the Gigabyte Z77X UD3, which does not have a USB 3.0 boost option. The Maximus V Formula and P8Z77 V Pro both share the same USB Boost functionality, so it comes as no surprise that we observe nearly identical speeds from the two ASUS boards. They fly past the Z77X UD3 with an 11.8% advantage in write speeds and a staggering 40.7% improvement in read. The UASP (available with the ASMedia controller) USB 3.0 Boost mode also offered a significant improvement in sequential read/write performance on the order of 100MB/s over standard USB 3.0. At a queue depth of 32, write speeds improved by 30% while read speeds nearly doubled. These crazy-fast USB 3.0 speeds will be a godsend for anyone who does large transfers on a regular basis.